Quick Summary
Apple has made changes to the Music app in iOS 18, with better playlist handling that's more like Spotify. It's currently in beta and will launch in September.
Apple Music is getting an upgrade that's been warmly welcomed by beta testers. The feature, which will be coming to the app in iOS 18, significantly improves the way Apple Music enables you to control and organise your playlists.
The new feature is a revamped playlist queue, with a new "Add Songs to Queue" button that sits at the bottom of the list of tracks. You'll be able to clear the entire song queue in one go, and if you change the currently playing song your queue will no longer vanish. The revamped system also enables you to add a song to your playlist as the next track; at the moment, adding a song sticks it right at the end of your playlist.
Apple's new playlists are proving popular
The new feature has proved popular on the iOS Beta subreddit (H/T to MacRumors), where the top comment in the discussion of the change is "F***KING FINALLY". As some commenters have pointed out, the changes aren't so much Apple adding new features as bringing back previously dropped ones: the changes mean Music works like it did until iOS 10 was released.
The changes bring the Apple Music app playlist handling closer to that of Spotify, which should reduce some of the friction for any users jumping ship from the rival streamer. However, some of the beta testers reckon that the recommendations on Apple's service still aren't as good as its rival. However, as we saw with the introduction of Spotify-style collaborative playlists earlier this year, Apple is slowly but steadily catching up.
That's important, because music streaming isn't like TV streaming where key shows are only available on specific streamers: while I need to have my Disney+ subscription to watch The Bear, the same siloing doesn't happen with music. Until you start getting into really obscure stuff, the streamers' catalogues are largely identical. Because of this music streamers don't compete on catalogue but on the quality of the overall experience, both in terms of sound quality and formats such as spatial audio, and on playlist management and social sharing. Apple already beats Spotify on the first two, and it clearly wants to beat it on the other fronts too.
